Lindsey Hancock Warden
Long-Term Planning
The building blocks of effective unit and lesson planning are created from the solid foundation of an effective long-term plan. I learned early in my teaching career that a lack of long-term planning can quickly lead to an educator falling into the trap of attempting to plan lessons on a weekly, or even daily, basis. That method certainly does not lead to maximum benefit for students, and also leaves the teacher feeling harried and stressed. An effective long-term plan allows the teacher to sit down and draw on her knowledge of her content area, the available curriculum, cross-discipline content, and pedagogy in order to create an effective long-term plan. This plan serves as a roadmap for the entire school year, encouraging my unit planning in advance, and helping me visualize the learning and learning goals for the year.
Table of Contents
School-Wide Planning
When I began working at my current placement, I quickly realized that there was little rhyme or reason to the content, skills, and knowledge being taught to students at any grade level. The school had no adopted set of standards or cohesiveness of teaching and learning between individual teachers and grade levels. Pedagogically speaking, I recognize the importance of adopting standards that are aligned to how we plan to assess students. Additionally, it is important that my secondary students enter my classes prepared for the complex level of work we will be doing. For those reasons, I met with the other English teachers in order to gather our objectives, skills, and knowledge taught in one centralized document in order to identify and fill any gaps in curriculum planning.
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This is a living document, and it is still being constantly modified and edited. I include it in this portfolio because it demonstrates my knowledge of pedagogy, curriculum, and community context. In order for any type of effective planning to take place, a school must ensure that students are building on their prior knowledge from previous classrooms and teachers. If teachers are merely teaching skills and knowledge at random, it prevents effective learning from taking place.
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In this artifact, notice that we have chosen to focus on grammar and useage skills in great detail in the lower grades, and review these skills in secondary. In my classes, which are seventh grade and above, I put the heaviest focus on reading and writing. We are currently in discussions as a staff on how the lower grades can best support the complex reading and writing tasks that I expect of my students in secondary grades. This form of long-term planning is an important start in ensuring that every learner can meet rigorous learning goals - as teachers, we must first prove that we have rigorous goals in place for students to meet!
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This document also directly supports planning, both in my classroom and school-wide, by helping teachers recall what they are planning to cover in a given year, as well as what their students will be expected to do in the coming year. When I sit down to create a long-term plan, this school-wide plan is the first document that I review.
Curriculum Map
The curriculum map is a very important document to my teaching practice. Each summer, I write a curriculum map for the upcoming school year. I start by reviewing my incoming students' achievement assessment results from the previous year. This is good pedagogy, and helps provide me with knowledge of the learners that will be entering my classroom. I use what I learn about my incoming students and their mastery of skills on the state achievement test to inform my curriculum map, determining in what order to teach standards, and how long to spend on each standard. I also consider which standards will compliment each other and can thus be taught in tandem.
The curriculum map demonstrates my knowledge of my content area, as it covers all of the reading, writing, and language standards that seventh and eighth graders are required to demonstrate mastery of. It includes rigorous learning goals, such as a major research paper that my students will write in the spring. It additionally includes elements of cross-disciplinary skills, as it includes the study of two time periods we are also covering in history, as well as a theater element.
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As I engage in unit and lesson planning, I refer frequently to this curriculum map. It, too, is a living document that I make adjustments to as I change my mind about texts, or need to spend longer on a skill based on assessment data. However, this artifact serves as the foundation of my planning for the academic year and sets my students and I up for success.
Thematic Planning
In addition to my curriculum map, I also spend some time each year considering some loose thematic units that can apply to the standards and texts that I would like to teach. I seek to make my thematic unit plans as detailed as possible, though there has not been a year yet where I have not had to make changes and adjustments.
This long-term plan is designed to support every learner in meeting rigorous goals by scaffolding complex standards and ideas on top of more familiar ones. Based on my knowledge of pedagogy, I teach skills like RL 7.1, which requires students to cite textual evidence, first. This is a foundational skill that students will need to demonstrate for the rest of the year.
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Thematically speaking, this long-term plan supports my use of knowledge of my learners and our community context to select texts that will fit the unit's theme while still supporting learning goals. For example, I traditionally teach excerpts from Esperanza Rising for Unit 2: Self and Community. That text encourages students to consider their identities while simultaneously providing plenty of material for class discussions and text-based questions, both important aspects of mastering RL 7.1.
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Each unit described in this artifact also inclues remediation strategies in order to support the learning goals of every student. Since students enter my class at every level of readiness, it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
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This artifact explicitly supports my drawing on knowledge of my content area, curriculum, and pedagogy via the spiraling strategies that are evidenced in this document. I plan for teaching and reteaching complex skills, while also building in time to review the basics.